Lunch with Ron Walker

It’s grand prix season in Melbourne and
Ron Walker
is in his element. Now in his 18th year as grand prix chairman, Walker wants to take me for a spin around the Albert Park circuit before lunch, so I meet him at his St Kilda Road private offices.

Sitting in his office is something of a Walker history lesson.

There’s Walker photographed with Barbara, his wife of 44 years and a former journalist. Then come the famous people. There’s Walker with Queen Elizabeth II, Walker with Princess Anne, Walker with former British prime ministers Margaret Thatcher and John Major.

Elsewhere hangs a painting of Walker and former prime minister
John Howard
. Then there’s the formula one paraphernalia. It’s everywhere; even Walker’s lovely personal assistant is wearing a pit crew outfit.

In contrast, Walker, 71, the unlikeliest of petrolheads, is wearing a sober navy suit and navy tie. He’s tall and lean with a mane of hair that’s cut in a 1970s style, and has a big, friendly face.

Before long we are in his white Porsche Cayenne winding around the controversial Albert Park circuit, where protective fences are being moved into place. It’s a very different set-up to the hay bales used to protect crowds when Walker as a boy came to watch Jack Brabham race around the same streets in the 1950s.

The grand prix is a controversial event for many Melburnians, who would prefer it didn’t exist or was moved to the city’s outskirts. Walker is weary of the anti-grand prix campaigners who want to save Albert Park.

“Albert Park has been saved," he says. “When you think it was the Melbourne tip before the races started there. It’s very wearing to have to defend that every year."

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Our slow lap of the Albert Park circuit is brought to a halt by a stern-looking construction worker holding a stop sign. He’s about to deliver us a lecture that we’re not allowed on the circuit when the Cayenne’s driver’s side window slides down and three words are spoken: “I’m Ron Walker."

Our passage is immediately allowed and it’s on to Rockpool Bar & Grill at the Crown casino for lunch. The casino was built by Hudson Conway, the property development and investment firm once run by Walker and Lloyd Williams. Walker sold out of the company in 2000. Property was where Walker began his career with some land investment on Phillip Island and it’s still what occupies him today. It represents most of his estimated wealth of $800 million. However, to see him only through the prism of property development would be wrong.

At one time he was treasurer of the federal Liberal Party in Australia and also a fund-raiser for the Conservative Party in the United Kingdom. He has a CBE (Commander of the Order of the British Empire) but despite his efforts on behalf of the Tories, he didn’t get a knighthood – friend and former politician
Andrew Peacock
teases him about this, calling him Lord Walker.

Walker remains an elder statesman of the Liberal Party – his role as treasurer was crucial in securing Howard’s election in 1996 – and overcoming the disunity that had plagued the party pre-Howard and kept it in opposition for so many years.

He is disappointed with the recent discord within the Coalition and with finance spokesman
Andrew Robb
’s involvement in it, but we’ll get to that after we order our Neil Perry-designed burgers.

Becoming Liberal Party treasurer wasn’t Walker’s first foray into politics. In the 1970s he was a lord mayor of Melbourne, hosting visits from Jordan’s King Hussein, Queen Elizabeth II and the Shah of Iran.

His career as a businessman extended beyond property development to include other roles, among them a period as chairman of Fairfax Media, publisher of The Australian Financial Review, when he defended editors against complaints from politicians even when those politicians came from within his own party.

Walker has also spent decades managing some of the biggest events in Victoria and Australia, among these the 2006 Commonwealth Games and the grand prix. Then there’s his long history of charity work, which at one point included plans for a daring rescue of an Australian tourist taken hostage by Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, funded by himself and other business executives.

At Crown casino, staff from the doormen to Rockpool’s waiters know Ron Walker and we’re ushered to “his" table. Walker says: “I’ll have my usual." Rockpool’s paper menus stay face down on our table. Walker has enthused about Rockpool’s burgers to me, so I join him in ordering one. We share a cos salad. He doesn’t drink at lunch so sparkling water quenches our thirst.

Once the ordering is done, Walker is horrified to learn that what we eat will be included in this article. He wonders aloud if he’s hyped the burgers too much and maybe I won’t like them.

His thoughts then turn to whether people will think him cheap because he’s taken us for burgers. Walker, who is old school, won’t hear of me paying the bill, even though it’s the rules of Lunch with the Financial Review.

Finally, he stops worrying and laughs uproariously. “Your friends are going to die!" he exclaims. “‘What did he buy you for lunch?’ He bought you a hamburger. ‘He bought you a what?’"

While we wait for our food we turn to the grand prix, which takes place this weekend. Walker spends more time than he wants defending the cost of the event.

“People sometimes put a view that with $50 million you could open so many child minding centres or put so many more beds in hospitals every year," he says. “They don’t seem to balance the fact it’s so good for tourism. It’s all about economic benefit and publicity for Melbourne. If you say that you collect about $18 million in tax for the weekend and the economic benefit is about $160 million . . . and you get $100 million of free publicity for the brand Melbourne through 132 countries, what is that worth to Melbourne? Unfortunately, the Auditor-General won’t let you put all those hypothetical figures on the balance sheet."

Walker is a passionate man, particularly when it comes to promoting Melbourne.

Our burgers arrive and Walker asks for English mustard. He prefers not to eat most of the bun, explaining that “weight doesn’t mean anything to you but it means a lot to me". It’s a surprising admission given his lanky frame.

The conversation turns to politics, and Walker’s reflections on the state of the federal Coalition when it emerged last month that Robb, a former federal director of the Liberal Party, aspired to take
Joe Hockey
’s job as shadow treasurer.

“I was surprised at all the publicity surrounding Andrew Robb a couple of weekends ago," he says. “He of all people knew that disunity was death, even though some of those comments had been made 12 months before. He was the director of the party with me when we fought back and won that election. He knew very well whenever there was an outbreak of tension between people it could be prostituted by the Labor Party to mean that we weren’t unified.

“When [former prime minister
Bob] Hawke
came out with that statement: ‘If you can’t govern yourself, you can’t govern a country’ it stuck, it just resonated with all the voters. Before the next election there will be some other people who are not content with their lot and they will say things off the record to journalists and away it will start again."

Walker believes part of the solution is for Opposition Leader
Tony Abbott
to consult more closely with Coalition backbenchers as Howard did. “
John Howard
was very clever – having spent years in the wilderness, he knew the perils of disunity and he used to spend a lot of time with backbenchers at night. If Tony Abbott stays on course he will consult with his party. After all, these backbenchers love to be consulted by their leader. If they’re included in discussions rather than the leader making all the decisions by himself, that’s what welds people together. They feel wanted."

For good measure, he adds that Prime Minister
Julia Gillard
has her work cut out to win the next election, with the carbon tax potentially her Achilles heel. Walker is yet to be convinced of global warming.

He grew up in a conservative household and says his political interests were sparked when, as a 17-year-old, he went to hear prime minister
Robert Menzies
speak. “I was smitten by his oratory skills."

Walker never became a federal politician, preferring not to leave behind his young family – he has three children – for Canberra. And then “there were so many other things to do in Melbourne".

Still, he was courted by former prime minister John Gorton, who invited Walker to run in his seat upon his retirement. Walker declined, instead putting his foot on the accelerator of his entrepreneurial and board career and management of big events.

We summon the waiter, who has discreetly left us to chat, to order coffee. I ask about the aborted plan to rescue David Wilson, the Australian backpacker murdered in Cambodia in 1994. Walker, businessmen
Dean Wills
,
Hugh Morgan
and
Robert Champion de Crespigny
, as well as Andrew Peacock and former Victorian premier
Jeff Kennett
, discussed a possible rescue.

There’s a weight to Walker’s shoulders when I raise the topic of Wilson’s untimely death. His group could raise the ransom of gold ingots and organise former SAS service men to undertake the rescue. But the plan was dropped because of fears it would fail, and even if successful and the ransom paid, it might have put other Australian tourists at risk.

“The Australian government felt that other Australian tourists would be picked off their bike and taken for ransom like David Wilson."

Preparing to wind up, I ask Walker why he doesn’t relax more. (He travels for work to the UK and Europe every six weeks.) “I don’t want to slow down. When you slow down is when age starts to creep in."